Words In Glass
by aggressivekinetic
Summary: Their words keep them together as the sea keeps them apart. As Elizabeth travels the world in search of a home and Will travels the seas in pursuit of his purpose, the two find a way to tie themselves to one another once again. The messages they send to one another keep them close as the physical rift between them grows.


The first bottle had come a few weeks (a few, long weeks) after he had disappeared at the edge of the horizon and into the ocean's depths. She had been almost unable to see it, the dark green of the glass blended into the waves of the same color, but it glinted in the morning sunlight in such a way as to catch her attention by almost blinding her. She had pulled the rolled paper out with her index finger and pressed it flat on the beach to read it through.

The second bottle appeared against the hull of her small fishing vessel (she had a fleet of ships to choose from and yet, she had picked this one to watch the sunset in each day as she pressed a hand to her belly and wished Will was there with her). It had bumped and bobbed along the side, making noise until she noticed it. Elizabeth hadn't been surprised when it had appeared but her heart fluttered, nonetheless. She knew Will wasn't the type to hide his affection anymore. Not now that they could see one another in fleeting, passing moments in their lives.

And, although she was an adult, a woman with a husband and a child – a woman who had lived through a harrowing war and seen the face of death more times than she could count – she still felt giddy thinking of Will penning these letters to her. He couldn't know that she had romanticized the idea of finding messages kept safe in glass bottles as a child. He couldn't know that she and her mother had passed a glass bottle back and forth, that her mother had indulged in her wild childhood fantasies by pretending she was a man trapped on an island with Elizabeth as his only hope of escape.

The power her memories lent to the letters made them more romantic than they already were.

The messages followed her across the oceans as she travelled. They were the one constant in her life as she searched for a place to settle into with her son after she left the (relative) safety of Shipwreck Cove.

They found her wherever she went, giving her comfort in knowing that Will might know where to find her when the time came.

Another bottle (she had lost count over the years since the first) had come when she and Henry were walking the surf of their new home. It had washed up in front of them as her son had taken a few, toddling steps towards a shell he particularly liked the shape of and as a child is often distracted from the thing they want, he easily took his eyes off the shell and took hold of the bottle.

He had looked up at her – his brown eyes so like Will's – and held it up with trembling arms and made noise at her until she took it. And so, she did.

Each time, she had taken the roll of paper, pressed it to her heart and then to her nose trying to pull even the faintest scent of Will out of a piece of paper that had borne his hand for less than a handful of moments as he had scratched a message across its surface. They carried the same message each time, more or less.

He loved her. He missed her.

He waited patiently to be able to return to her.

Sometimes he reminisced on times long past when he had been too shy and too restrained by the chains of social custom to tell her he loved her.

She reminisced with him sometimes.

The first bottle she had returned to the sea with a message of her own. She was with child. She wanted to name the child after him, if they had a boy, and after her mother, if they had a girl. Will had sent back a message almost as soon as she had tossed the bottle to the waves and she found it easy to hear his voice, smiling as he told her that they didn't need another William Turner in the family. She could name their child Weatherby or Jack or Hector but they did not need another William Turner in the world.

The bottle that she returned to the sea after Henry's birth had included a lock of Henry's curling brown hair. A corner of a handkerchief with her initials messily sewn into it as she'd never been the neatest of hand when embroidering. Which, she supposed, was why her father had let her give it up so easily. She tucked the hair and the embroidery inside the curling piece of paper with a note filled with her tales of daily life with their son. Henry had smiled at her for the first time, he had rolled over by himself, he had started crawling and she had to put the few keepsakes from her childhood on a higher shelf, and then on an even higher shelf when he began to pull himself up on the furniture.

It wasn't quite like he was there but it allowed him a glimpse into their life that he would never have had otherwise and Elizabeth was grateful for it. Grateful for her husband's (and that was a word that still sent a shivering thrill through her) ingenuity.

As time wore on, Will's words got the better of him and he wrote sentence upon sentence, paragraph upon paragraph, and ran out of room in the bottle for the sheaves of paper he used up in expressing himself to her. He talked of their time in Port Royal together, his inevitable run-ins with Jack and how he had evaded death this time around, the fate of the _Black Pearl_ , and how he missed the simplicity of the days they had as teenagers and that they had never been destined for simplicity. The course of their lives had been irrevocably altered by that first shipwreck. Will told her how he missed her. How he had tried not to grieve the marriage that had been lost. He told her of the faces he saw on his journeys, both familiar and unfamiliar.

However, he never spoke to her of his deepest worries; of the despondence he felt some days and the dreamless sleep he endured. He loved her too much to let her know how the captainship had begun to affect him and yet, she could sense that there was more behind what he wrote to her. That there was more to the same staunch and loving words he wrote to her each time he sent a bottle her way.

She had developed a sense for what his words truly meant over the years and the piles of paper they had accumulated.

And so she kept watch on the horizon for the glint of a bottle, always hoping he would let himself lay his troubles bare and give them to her to shoulder but he had always been too noble to do that. He never wanted to trouble her but by refusing to do so, he only troubled her more.

But she loved him all the more for it.


End file.
